


Gazing Softly Down

by Lomonaaeren



Series: 2013 Advent Fics [11]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Advent, Angst, Carnival, M/M, Romance, Surreal, mazes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-11
Updated: 2013-12-11
Packaged: 2018-01-04 09:11:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1079182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry broke up with Draco because Draco couldn't get along with his friends, but now he wants him back. Draco is going to show him how well he has learned to guard his heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gazing Softly Down

**Author's Note:**

> This is another of my Advent fics, for dragontara, who asked for a Harry/Draco story inspired by the song “Carnival of Rust” by the band Poets of the Fall. This draws a little on the video and a little on the lyrics. Happy Advent!

“Why should I believe you?”  
  
Harry grimaced and looked down at the dents and rust stains in their table at the Hog’s Head. “That’s fair,” he said, and ignored Draco’s bitter snort across from him. “You should believe me because I really want you back, and even Ron and Hermione telling me that I was better off without you couldn’t keep me from coming here.” He peered up at Draco.  
  
Draco had paused in raising his tarnished tankard to his lips. Harry watched the curl of his tongue, and  _ached_.  
  
“Your precious friends wanted you to stay away, and you didn’t?”  
  
Harry winced a little at the wonder in Draco’s voice, but nodded. “Yes. They said that since I broke up with you, I’d made the right decision, and I should stay away from you. But I couldn’t.” That last admission galled him, but he’d come to terms with it through long nights of lying awake. He’d done what he could to fight it. He couldn’t. So he was here.  
  
Draco put his tankard down on the table and leaned across it to pry up Harry’s eyelids and stare into them. Harry grimaced, but endured it. He expected Draco’s question. “So you’re not on any medicinal potions to fuel your false bravado? And I would know if you were drunk.”  
  
Harry swallowed. He knew he was far gone when he didn’t even resent that last insult because of the knowledge it implied Draco had of him, and which he had thought it worthwhile to retain in his head. “That’s right. I’m not—either of those things. I want—I want you back.”  
  
Draco leaned back again and picked up his drink. He swallowed most of it, throat muscles working in a way that made Harry’s groin ache this time, and then lowered it and regarded Harry with eyes that he was better than ever at making cold. “I’ve learned how to guard my heart.”  
  
Harry nodded. He’d heard of Draco dating a few people in the year since they broke up, but he’d always been the one to end things with them, and Harry couldn’t blame him, not after the way Harry had botched things.  
  
“So I’m going to make you prove yourself.” Draco drew a long quill through his fingers. Harry blinked. He hadn’t even seen Draco conjure it, or pull it out of his pocket, whichever one it was he’d done. “This is a map that I want you to read.”  
  
Harry accepted, after a few minutes, the parchment that Draco had finished drawing on, feeling slightly unreal. He’d gone on a quest once to find and destroy Horcruxes. Was Draco going to make him hunt something similar?  
  
 _Except you’ll do it without Ron and Hermione, this time._  
  
Harry swallowed again. He had known that his friends would always think it was the wrong thing, to get back together with Draco, and he’d gone ahead and done it anyway. Just like he’d come to terms with not being able to move on from Draco.  
  
“There was a maze that one of my ancestors set up on the Manor grounds, centuries ago.” Draco lounged back in his chair, his legs crossed at the thigh, his feet up on the chair beside him. Even that made Harry ache with want, although it wasn’t a gesture he remembered Draco doing when they were together. “He wanted to make sure that some of our treasures would always be safe.”  
  
Harry nodded, thinking he understood. “And you want me to get to the center and find what he hid there?”  
  
“Oh, no,” Draco said, standing. “My father retrieved those treasures back when we had to find money to make ends meet.” He leaned over the table to Harry, and his smile was enchantingly nasty.  
  
“ _I’ll_ be at the center,” he said softly, his lips a centimeter or so from Harry’s ear. “Behind some extremely perilous traps and beasts. Defeat them, and I’ll decide that you love me enough to want me back. Don’t defeat them, and you can rot in the ground for all I care.”  
  
Harry’s heartbeat sped up, and he did his best to turn his head and capture Draco’s lips before he pulled back. Draco only raised his eyebrows and moved off without making it seem like avoiding Harry was his intention at all.  
  
“I look forward to our next meeting,” he said. “Perhaps a meeting at which only one of us is whole, but that’s the test I chose.” And he sauntered out of the Hog’s Head without looking back.  
  
Harry stared down at the map, and nodded. It looked as if the main challenge of the maze would be the traps and beasts that Draco had told him about, since the layout of the tunnels and corners was relatively simple. He could do this.  
  
He could do a lot of things, in order to be with Draco again.  
  
*  
  
Harry had Apparated to the gates of Malfoy Manor, and found the wards lowered for him—or perhaps the exemption to their power that Draco had once granted him had never been revoked. It wasn’t as though Harry had come to the Manor after his expulsion by Draco in order to test that.  
  
And now he stood before what had to be the maze, a set of white stone walls tucked in a deceptively quiet corner of the grounds. Harry took a deep breath and studied the map one more time before he stuffed the parchment back in his pocket. He had the first section of the route memorized, and it wasn’t as though he’d be able to look at it in the middle of a battle and get confirmation of where he was anyway.  
  
The quiet endured as Harry approached the entrance. It had no proper gate, only a pair of gigantic rosebushes shading the entrance with drooping leaves and reaching thorns. Harry paused, but no one charged out of them at him. He could see the white cobblestone paths that made up the maze running straight into the distance.  
  
He walked under the rosebushes.  
  
The landscape promptly shifted and blurred, and when Harry could see again, he stood in a flat grey area that was probably stone but looked an awful lot like Muggle concrete. Rusty buildings loomed around him, and rusty music drifted from them. Harry stared around. Where was the path? This looked nothing like the map Draco had drawn.  
  
“Come, come, young sir, come!”  
  
Harry spun. There was a pale man beckoning him, one dressed in half a grey mask—or maybe the mask was part of his face, considering the way the rotting mouth stretched open to show equally rotting teeth a second later. His beckoning hand dropped a second later to stroke the strings of a guitar, a bright and bizarre pale blue, strung around his neck.  
  
“This is what you’re looking for, isn’t it?” he asked, and sang a wordless chord that made Harry flinch and yet drew him forwards.  
  
An image of Draco’s face formed in the air above him, drifting like a balloon above the buildings and the music, and gazing softly down at Harry. There was a smile on the lips that Harry hadn’t seen in a long time.  
  
“Yes,” Harry said, and then winced. Draco had always said that Harry had more courage than good sense, and maybe this was an example of that. Who knew what the traps of the maze might do with Draco’s name and image? Harry glanced warily at the pale man.  
  
But he was laughing, little, soft, graveyard puffs of air, his mouth open like a fish’s. “You can find it in there,” he said, and pointed to a building. Harry turned and saw the curtain on the front of it fluttering open, as though someone had just passed through it.  
  
The curtain was made of bone-white cloth, and fringed with blue beads. Harry took a step forwards, then glanced back. The man had vanished, along with his guitar, but Draco’s face still hung above him, the only moon or guiding light that he would have here. It moved with Harry, turning to look at him.  
  
“Right,” Harry muttered. This was obviously going to be harder than he thought. He ducked through the curtain.  
  
The curtain fluttered and passed him through a space that seemed to take a lot longer to traverse than the size of it should have, and spat him out within a room that Harry didn’t understand at first. He could see a faint silver shimmer on the walls, but more than that, he could see his startled face from every angle.  
  
 _Oh._ It was a house of mirrors.  
  
Harry reached out a hand in front of him, to keep from bumping his head. But his fingers passed through a mirror, and he stepped forwards and found it dissolving like mist around him, or the curtain. He could see an image of himself as he had appeared when he was younger; it must be, because the scar was more vivid on his forehead and his hands clutched the sleeves of a robe that he’d worn when he was in Auror training. He was gaping at something just out of sight.  
  
Before the mirror faded and Harry lost sight of that image, he saw what that Harry was looking at. Draco Malfoy, sitting with his head bowed on a bench, waiting for some word about whether his father was guilty of the new crimes he’d been accused of since the war.  
  
The younger Harry took a step forwards, and Harry was inside a thick maze of mirrors in the next second, swallowing. That image hadn’t happened—he couldn’t remember seeing Draco in the Ministry like that, only hearing that he was there to try and clear Lucius—but it easily could have.  
  
“So that’s the game, is it?” he asked aloud. His voice seemed to make frost creep up the mirrors, obscuring the reflections that, he saw now, all looked subtly different from him. “I have to find the real me?”  
  
There was no answer, but two of the mirrors, in front of him and to the side, melted away and there was another mirror in their place, one that was bigger and bent around him. Harry glared at his distorted face in it.  
  
His reflection glared back, his mouth moving. Harry could make out the shapes of curse words, though not much else. Once again, the image shifted, and Harry saw Draco standing with bowed head and clenched fists in front of him, in the drawing room of the house that they had shared.  
  
Harry stared. He couldn’t remember an argument like that, couldn’t remember a time when Draco had looked so humbled and cowed. Draco simply didn’t react like that when Harry started an argument. Or when Harry yelled at him. Or when Harry tried to make him get along with his friends—  
  
The mirror wavered, and a silver mist seemed to rise from the floor of the drawing room and wrap around Draco. Harry stretched a hand out. “No!” he said, involuntarily. So far, the mirrors seemed unaware of him.  
  
But the silver fog paused, and drew back from Draco. He raised his head and answered the angry Harry’s words with some spirit, and that mirror wisped apart, too, leaving what looked like a short but clear corridor in front of Harry. He licked his lips, hoping that he was passing the test of the maze, and walked on.  
  
The corridor turned out to be shorter than he had thought, and Harry rapped his forehead smartly on the glass at the end of it. He rubbed his brow and turned to stare at the person this suddenly brightening mirror reflected.  
  
It turned out to be Draco, this time, and not Harry. Draco lay sated on a bed Harry didn’t know, his mouth open and his head tilted back to the ceiling. Harry crossed his arms over his stomach, which twisted with jealousy.  
  
There was another man with him, his head bowed so that all of Harry could see of him was his dark hair, kissing his way along Draco’s thigh. Draco dropped a hand and stroked his hair, and the man turned his cheek into the caress.  
  
Harry could remember doing that, once, but not for a long time. During their last months together, their constant arguments over Harry’s friends, and especially Draco’s refusal to  _apologize_ to Ron or Hermione when he insulted them, had overridden everything else.  
  
The mirror turned into a fountain of light and glass shards, cascading to the floor with ringing sounds, and Harry thought he knew what this was about, now. The mirrors really showed Draco, and not himself at all. That he had appeared in the first two images was only coincidence. Maybe Draco had seen Harry in that corridor at the Ministry without Harry ever knowing he was there.  
  
But that still didn’t tell Harry what the test was, or how he was supposed to find his way through this maze.  
  
 _The map!_  
  
Harry promptly fumbled the parchment out of his pocket and studied it. Yes, he had turned left, the way he would have at the second corner, to come into the house of mirrors, and right when he went over to confront the man with the guitar, as he should have at the first turn. And there was a short corridor marked on the map with an abbreviation that Harry had seen before in Draco’s private notes. It meant that an illusion awaited at the end, and it looked as if he should go on. But he shouldn’t. He should face left, and, said another abbreviation, “await what would come.”  
  
Harry licked his lips and turned to do as Draco directed, bracing himself a little when a shadow moved along the wall.  
  
The shadow flicked back like a cloth, and revealed yet another mirror, though one that seemed to bend away down a much longer corridor, maybe many mirrors, although Harry couldn’t see a break between them. In the glass, Draco was pirouetting around a grey area that could have been the one outside this place, between the buildings Harry had seen. The sky above him was grey, too, and rain fell. Draco tossed his head back and laughed.  
  
Harry squinted. This Draco looked younger, but familiar. He had the impression that he had seen that exact Draco before.  
  
 _Of course._  
  
This was Draco the night they had broken up. He no longer wore the shirt that he had stormed out of their house in, being naked from the waist up, but those emerald-green trousers were the same. And he was running around in the rain, letting it ruin the careful haircut that he’d had in those last months with Harry.  
  
Why had he come to the maze? Why had he danced and laughed in the rain like a madman? If anything, Harry would have thought that he’d go home to brood or smash things.  
  
Then Harry swallowed. He’d been wrong about Draco before. He’d never seen him exactly as the mirrors had pictured him here. What if he’d been wrong about  _that_ assumption, too?  
  
The glass in front of him shimmered and expanded, and Harry took a sharp breath. The mirrors were responding to the thoughts he had about Draco, then. They  _had_ to be. He took a glance at the parchment map in his hands again, and thought he knew what he had to do, although there was no neat little notation in Draco’s hand to tell him this time.   
  
He leaped forwards, his arms wide to embrace the Draco dancing in front of him.  
  
There was a complicated moment when Harry thought he was flying through space and the mirror seemed to think that it had stopped him. Harry found himself dropping straight down to a crouch on empty earth, and cocked his head back.  
  
He was outside the house of mirrors, or at least back under the grey sky, rolling and rushing with clouds. Crystal raindrops sparkled along the edge of his vision, but had vanished by the time Harry turned his head. Harry shook his head and focused on the expanse in front of him. It didn’t look as though it was imaginary, but he still wanted to study it before he continued walking straight ahead, the way the map insisted he had to.  
  
There was a pewter statue in front of him, a man with no features where his face should be standing tall, his arms spread as though to shake his fists at the heavens. At his feet was a pool into which the raindrops seemed to be falling. When Harry tried to look at it more directly, the pool dried up, but it flooded back when he relaxed and returned to looking at it out of the corner of his eye.  
  
And when Harry looked at the statue again, it wasn’t blank. It had Draco’s face instead, in a mood of exultation that Harry had never seen when Draco was with him.  
  
 _How much of him was I ignoring? How much was I suppressing? How much did I never see?_  
  
The map definitely said that he was supposed to move towards the statue, so Harry walked to it and then around it, trying to ignore the continually appearing and disappearing pool at its feet. There was no door in back of the statue. There was no plinth it stood on that Harry could have ducked in or under, and when he fell to his belly and tried to feel at the feet, they revealed themselves as annoyingly solid.  
  
Harry leaned back and stared at the statue. Then he checked the map again. There were lines swirling out from this place, but he could see that all of them led to dead ends and false trails. Where the statue stood, at least as far as Harry could figure out when adapting from the parchment to what was in front of him, was carefully labeled, “The Center of the Maze.”  
  
Harry shook his head. Draco had said that he would have to prove himself. He had spoken of beasts attacking Harry. But all Harry had done was smash through a few mirrors. Was he supposed to feel regret at losing Draco?  
  
He’d already experienced a solid year of that.  
  
Then Harry swallowed. The crystal raindrops were forming a pool at the moment, and he was close enough to it, with his head tilted at an odd angle, between the statue’s legs, that he could see into the surface of it even though he normally couldn’t look straight on. There was a beast crouched there now, a grey lion with the eyes of a basilisk.  
  
Bright green eyes.  
  
Himself.  
  
The mirrors had shown Draco, but this pool showed him. Harry raked his hand through his hair and licked his lips, and the beast in the image struck out a forked tongue and lapped its parted jaws. When he drew his wand, it lifted a clawed foot and showed off impressive talons. What was he supposed to do with  _this_? Did he have to fight himself to reach the center of the maze? It made sense, but there was no way that Harry could see to get the beast out of the water.  
  
Then he closed his eyes and remembered the Draco lounging in the middle of the Hog’s Head. A new Draco, a sexy Draco, more confident and stronger. He had set Harry a riddle. He had offered Harry the chance to win him back.  
  
But he didn’t  _need_ him anymore. He wasn’t impressed by Harry, if he ever had been. It made sense that he would set up something that might be a trick or a trap, and watch to see how Harry reacted to it, whether or not he would trust Draco more than he would get involved in his own cares and imaginings.  
  
Harry stood up, ignoring the way the pool shrank with the movement of his body, and took out his wand again. He tossed it on the ground.  
  
There was a long, shimmering, perfect moment, like a gong beaten inside his bones, and then a light shone on him from above. Harry tilted his head back.  
  
Draco’s face was in the sky again, shining down on him like a moon that could command no werewolves.  
  
But it was the only moon that  _Harry_ needed, speaking to a deeper tide in his blood than a werewolf’s beast, and he stretched his arms out in front of him and dived straight into the pool, into the dry earth that held no pool, into the reflection that reared up to meet him with flapping tongue and ripping claws and gaping teeth.  
  
*  
  
He was falling down the beast’s throat, crushed by twisting scales, his body slick with sweat and spit and other juices, and he could hear laughter, distant and cruel, from far away, and he didn’t know where it came from.  
  
Then it was over. Harry lifted his head, sprawled on the earth as he was, and blinked and twisted around.  
  
He was naked, on the grey earth that must be the center of the maze, raked free of any trace of flowers, but with no house of mirrors or statue or pool, either. Harry glanced from side to side, and saw that it  _was_ marked by footprints. Draco’s footprints, the traces of his naked feet, as he strode forwards and stood over him, legs straddling Harry’s hips.  
  
Harry looked up at him, mouth dry with want, reminded of the way Draco had sprawled in the Hog’s Head, the comfort he had with his body now, where Harry had never seen him that way before.  
  
“Yes,” Draco said softly, probably answering some sort of plea in Harry’s eyes, although Harry didn’t know what it was. He bent towards him, his face thoughtful. Behind him, that image the grey man had conjured still floated, a larger twin. “Yes, I suppose you’ll do. Since you had the courage to  _trust me._ ”  
  
His voice was steel and sharpness, and Harry lay back and let his legs sprawl open, his arms fall down until he had almost buried his elbows in the mud, his throat tilting until Draco could have bitten all of it. He heard Draco catch his breath.  
  
“It was always  _you_ ,” Draco said at last. His voice was edged, sparking, but not harder than the glass shards of the mirror that had turned into water. “You were always the one who made the decisions, to break up with me or take me back or forgive me for insulting your friends or telling me where we should go tonight. Well.  _I_ got to tell you what to do with the map, and telling me what you could put yourself through to win me back.”  
  
Harry drew in a ragged breath. He was tempted to argue, no question. He wanted to say that it had never been like that, that Draco was imagining things, that Harry would have  _known_ if he was that domineering.  
  
But the mirrors had shown him so many things that he’d never noticed. He remained still.  
  
“You don’t always argue,” Draco said, clinically. “Good.” His hands moved to his belt.  
  
Harry held his breath this time. Draco caught his gaze and blinked once. “This is a trial basis,  _only_ ,” he said. “I might not take you back permanently.”  
  
Harry nodded frantically, his hair brushing the mud and getting tangled with it. God, any trial basis was better than the year he’d spent alone. And he would do what he had to do, fight and compromise and struggle and crawl through mirrors, to try and make sure that they stayed together this time.  
  
“Good,” Draco said. “I like you silent sometimes.”  
  
He bent down, from his standing position, and bit Harry’s throat. Harry cried out, then tried to clamp his lips shut. Draco smiled at him from his own shut lips.  
  
“I said  _sometimes_ ,” he said, and his belt hit the earth, and Harry looked up and up, accepting, absorbing the sight of Draco’s face, the smaller twin of the larger one still floating in the sky, smiling down at him like his own moon.  
  
 **The End.**


End file.
